To be fair, it seems to be mainly Star Wars. There have been at least a half-dozen or more disappointing Star Trek movies (conservative estimate), several less-than-great X-Men movies, and a shitload of terrible Bond movies, but I don’t remember any death threats in the aftermath of those films. Almost all of the Alien and Indiana Jones sequels have been mediocre to terrible. The DC movies have also been pretty shitty (pre- and post-DCEU), but I don’t remember anyone suggesting that Bryan Singer should have been murdered for Superman Returns. The Marvel movies go off in all sorts of weird and unorthodox directions and the fans are pretty much on board with that.

Nah, it’s mostly Star Wars. And I’d suggest there’s a good reason for that. For 22 years, there were only three Star Wars movies (no, let’s not count the Holiday Special or the Ewok things), and so the hardcore fans had to make do with their own ideas about what the universe was like. (Sure, there were comics and novels in the ‘90s, but nobody was under any illusions that they were 100% canonical.) And so any official attempts to expand that universe are going to run up against those assumptions, whether it was Lucas’s or Disney’s versions of the saga. Most franchises are immunized against that sort of thing because they’re either constantly undergoing soft or hard reboots (like Star Trek and Batman) or have multiple characters and storylines going on simultaneously, like the MCU. That’s where Mangold was dead-on. Star Wars is basically a religion in a way that other franchises aren’t. And when you add newer testaments to the canon, the true believers are gonna get testy.